Performance Series at Dia:Beacon

Saturday and Sunday, February 25 and 26, 2012
12 pm and 2 pm

Sunday, May 13, 2012
1 pm and 3 pm

Dia Art Foundation is pleased to present dance works by renowned avant-garde choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, in Beacon, New York. Dia’s retrospective will celebrate the depth of Rainer’s contributions to dance and will feature her earliest works of choreography from the 1960s—including both iconic and lesser-known pieces—and three compositions created within the last twelve years.

As co-founding member of Judson Dance Theater, Yvonne Rainer produced groundbreaking works that echoed ideas of time, space, and seriality that were being explored in the field of visual art at the time. Throughout the 1960s, Rainer and the other Judson choreographers—including Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, and Steve Paxton, among others—developed a new vocabulary for dance that built upon nonexpressive techniques and chance procedures, while also incorporating task-oriented movements that brought attention to the physicality of the body.

This program is made possible by Yoko Ono and Dia’s Commissioning Committee : Jill and Peter Kraus, Leslie and Mac McQuown, Genny and Selmo Nissenbaum, and Liz Gerring Radke and Kirk August Radke.

YVONNE RAINER

Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a dancer in New York at the Martha Graham Dance School and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and began to choreograph in 1960. She was a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, a movement that began in 1962 and proved to be a vital force in redefining dance for the following decades. Starting in 1968, Rainer began to integrate short films into her live performances and, by 1975, had made a complete transition to filmmaking. She has since completed seven experimental feature films, and, in 1997, retrospectives of Rainer’s films were held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

In 2000, Rainer returned to dance after a 30-year hiatus with a commission by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project titled, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (2000). Most recently, she choreographed AG Indexical, with a Little Help from H.M. (2006), a reinterpretation of George Balanchine’s Agon ; RoS Indexical (2007), after Vaslav Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring ; and Spiraling Down (2008), a meditation on soccer, aging, and war. In 2010, Yvonne Rainer : Dance and Film, the first major European survey of Rainer’s work was presented at the Tramway in Glasgow, Scotland. Rainer is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), three Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, and 1996), a MacArthur Fellowship (1990–95), and a Wexner Prize (1995). She currently lives and works in California and New York.

A premiere collection of Yvonne Rainer’s poetry, Poems, is newly released by Badlands Unlimited (2011). For more information, visit www.badlandsunlimited.com